La Planète Sauvage (Fantastic Planet) (1973)

A trippy, French, animated sci-fi film from the 70's? Sounds interesting, right? Ugh. Wrong. Fantastic Planet depicts a future in which humans have been brought to another planet to be the pets of a race of humanoid blue giants called Traags. They're highly technologically advanced and fairly cruel to their human underlings (called "Oms"), deliberating about exterminating the large number who run wild. Part of the story is narrated by Terr, an Om who is taken as a pet by the young female Traag Tiwa after his mother is killed. As he matures, he finds a way to gain Traag knowledge by connecting to Tiwa's learning device, which is the source of all her education. He escapes and meets up with a colony of wild Oms, and encourages them to use the learning device to find a way to stop the Traags' pending extermination.

This movie is boooooring. It's laden with ear-splitting tonal "music" and not much in the way of plot structure. The characters are empty shells, the dialogue is awkward, and the climax is really stupid and unexciting. I'm pretty sure Fantastic Planet started out as some high-concept short art film that someone thought should be developed into a full-length movie. These people don't know how to actually tell a story, instead relying on haphazard narration and large stretches of unnecessary silent scenes to hash out some sort of clumsy narrative.

The visuals could have been cool, but I didn't really like the animation, which is stilted and poorly designed; it is reminiscent of Lutz Dammbeck's The Tailor from Ulm, an anti-Communist art film from 1980, but that was actually interesting and knew to keep the length short when creating an ambiguous dystopia with no clear plot. I'm sure there's some kind of message in here about humans' false concept of superiority or a harsh regime's subjugation of its citizens, but I certainly don't need to watch a pretentious, unskilled movie to figure that kind of thing out.

1.5/5